


Lord of the Flies

by PyrrhaIphis



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: Canon Compliant, Flaming Creatures v. a Fly, Introspection, M/M, house fly, quirky character moments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-28 02:02:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8426587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PyrrhaIphis/pseuds/PyrrhaIphis
Summary: The biggest fly any of them have ever seen gets into the flat shared by the Flaming Creatures and Arthur Stuart.  The results are every bit as odd as you might expect.
(Set sometime after the Death of Glitter concert.  Probably at least a year later, but the exact timing isn't terribly important.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if there are any Americanisms in here so I can fix them! Thanks!

            It was, by far, the biggest fly any of them had ever seen.  No one was quite sure how it had gotten into the flat—even cheap as the place was, it wasn’t usually pest-ridden—but they knew that it was big, noisy and _fast_.

            Initially, it was just buzzing around and annoying Malcolm while he was trying to write a new song.  But it kept flying away every time he tried to swat it, and soon it was getting in the way of Ray’s guitar practice.  Ray couldn’t swat it any more than Malcolm could, though.  When it tried to buzz Billy, he did his best to hit it with his drumsticks, but it was always two wing beats ahead of him.

            That was when they got Arthur involved in the chase.  He was the fastest of the five of them, and had recently become the tallest, but even he wasn’t having any luck swatting the thing.  He found it more than a bit depressing that he couldn’t even swat a simple fly.  What good was he if he couldn’t do even that?

            Maybe it was to comfort—or distract—Arthur that Pearl came up with the idea of letting the fly be.  He said they should adopt it as their mascot, and let it live.  Called it a prince among flies.  Everyone else said he was mental, and became more determined than ever to kill the flying pest, but by then no one could find it.  It had flown off somewhere and landed out of sight.

            On and off for the next twelve hours or so, they’d hear it zip across the room, but no one was quite able to set eyes on it.  By the time they looked in the direction of the sound of its buzzing wings, it had already landed again, and was quite out of sight.  Except for Pearl, they were all at their wit’s end.

            Pearl was the one that found it again.  “I’ve decided to name him Frederick,” he told them.

            “Who?” Arthur asked, thinking maybe Pearl had taken in a stray cat.  Or, knowing him, a rat, or maybe a weasel.  If there were weasels in London.  There probably weren’t.

            “The fly, of course.  He’s on the sill above the bath.”

            The others rushed into the loo, rolled up newspapers and flyswatters in hand, ready to stop the flying menace no matter what it took.

            It turned out not to take anything at all:  the fly was already dead.

            Evidently, it had landed on the window sill and simply expired.  “Biggest bloody thing I’ve ever seen,” Ray said, with a slight shudder.  “How’d that monster even get in here?”

            “We should clear it away,” Malcolm said.  “It’s disgusting.”

            “Leave Frederick alone!” Pearl exclaimed.  “He’s just resting!”

            “It’s definitely dead, Pearl,” Arthur told him, setting a hand on his arm.  “Look, it’s kind of…coming apart.”

            “No, that’s just what flies look like up close.”

            “What _are_ you on today?” Malcolm asked, looking at Pearl suspiciously.  “Whatever it is, it’s gone off.”

            “I haven’t taken anything.” Pearl insisted.

            “Arthur, get the bin over here,” Ray said.  “Clear it off the sill.  After all, we just cleaned up in here.  Looks terrible, spoiling an otherwise pristine loo.”

            “Hey, there’s an idea!”  Billy vanished out of the room for a minute, then came back with a camera.  He promptly took about a dozen photos of the fly’s enormous corpse.

            “Now you’ve gone mental, too?” Malcolm asked, with a weary sigh.

            Billy shook his head, and held up the camera.  “Album cover,” he said, with a grin.  “It’ll be perfect.”

            “Oh, yes!” Pearl agreed.  “We could call it ‘The Lord of the Flies’!  That’s perfect for Frederick.”

            “If we’re going to call the album ‘Lord of the Flies,’ then the fly should be called Beelzebub,” Billy pointed out.

            “With a name like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ people will expect the album to have something to do with the novel,” Arthur pointed out.

            “Good idea!” Malcolm agreed, clapping him on the shoulder.  “The eternal struggle, hopeless survival against miserable death… _perfect_!  There’s at least one song in that.”

            “Um…you think so?”  Arthur had actually thought that mentioning that bleak book would make them change their minds about the album title…

            “Absolutely!”

            “Oh…uh…that’s good.”  Arthur was happy to help Malcolm come up with a song—writing songs really wasn’t the forte of anyone in the band, particularly where lyrics were concerned—but it really didn’t sound like a good choice of topic to him.

            “You deserve a nice reward,” Malcolm went, his hand moving down to Arthur’s shoulder blades, caressing lightly.  “Who do you want to sleep with tonight?”

            Arthur’s cheeks were burning.  “Who…?”

            “Anyone,” Malcolm urged.

            “Don’t phrase it like that,” Ray said, frowning at Malcolm.  “Not unless you have some way of producing Curt Wild.”

            Arthur wanted to go hide in a closet, or under a bed.  Anywhere that they wouldn’t be able to see his whole body turning such a disagreeable red.

            Malcolm sighed.  “Which one of the four of us do you want to sleep with tonight?” he corrected himself, sounding a bit perturbed.

            “It doesn’t really matter to me,” Arthur muttered, looking down at his feet.

            “Why do you always say that?” Ray asked.  “Don’t you have any desires of your own?”

            Arthur shrugged lightly, and tuned the world out as the Flaming Creatures started arguing amongst themselves.

            Desires of his own?  There had been lots of things he had wanted in his life, just like anyone else.  There had been lots of _people_ he had wanted, but it had never been like that.  He had wanted the girl he fancied to like him back, or at least acknowledge that he existed.  He had fantasized about Brian Slade oh so many times back in Manchester.

            But he probably wouldn’t have known what to do with that girl even if she had returned his affections.  And when he had seen Brian in person—in the brief window before he pretended to get killed—Arthur hadn’t felt any urge to try to meet him, not even for an autograph, much less for anything more intimate.

            Only once in his life had he truly wanted— _needed_ —someone else enough to go after them, to do anything to be with them.  But even then, he hadn’t quite known what to do about it.  He had pursued Curt, but he had still needed Curt to make the first move— _all_ the moves.  Arthur had been too paralyzed by that unfamiliar desire to know how to act on it beyond following Curt around.  Too enflamed by his own lust to do anything to relieve it.

            Realistically, it was probably for the best that Curt had gone off without him the next morning.  If he had kept living so filled with the heat of that desire at all times…he’d have ignited from within.  Burned up like…like…

            “Hey, what was that Greek’s name?” Arthur asked.  “The one who flew too close to the sun and melted.”

            “Icarus,” Billy said.

            “It was his wings that melted, not him,” Malcolm added.  “What brings that up?”

            “Do you think that’s what happened to Frederick?” Pearl asked.  “That he got too close to one of the lights and fried himself?”

            “Huh?”  They had started talking about the fly again?  Was _that_ a more interesting subject than who Arthur was going to end up having sex with that night?  How depressing!

            “Flies don’t even live that long to begin with, Pearl,” Ray said, shaking his head.  “But Icarus, wasn’t he the one who drove the sun and burned down the whole world?”

            “No, that was…I think his name was Python or Phaethon,” Billy told him.  “Something like that.”

            “You know, that would make a good song, too,” Malcolm commented after a moment’s thought.  “You’re a real genius!” he added, tousling Arthur’s hair.

            Then he hurried back out to the table and started jotting down lyrics.  The others hurried after him, complimenting and criticizing over his shoulder.  Not that Malcolm was listening to them.

            As he followed them out of the loo, Arthur couldn’t help smiling.  He didn’t love them, it was true.  They didn’t fill him with a deep and unquenchable thirst, the way Curt had from the moment Arthur first laid eyes on him.  But he really enjoyed their companionship—they were his first, maybe his only, real friends.  And he loved their music.  The sex was definitely better for them than it was for him, but it wasn’t like it was _bad_ for him.

            Making his friends happy was more important than his own physical pleasure anyway.

            And that was how it was supposed to be, wasn’t it?

**Author's Note:**

> In memoriam of the really huge fly that died on my bathroom window sill. Thanks for the weird story, dead fly...though I won't lie and say that you'll be missed.


End file.
